orrow's sun shall behold thee the
partner of my throne!"

Manto wore a poniard. She struck Benedetto to the heart, and he fell dead.
She drew the corpse back into the passage, and hurried to her home. Opening
her master's volume again, she read:

Taedet coeli convexa tueri.

A few minutes afterwards her father entered the chamber to tell her he had
at last found the philosopher's stone, but, perceiving his daughter hanging
by her girdle, he forbore to intrude upon her, and returned to his
laboratory.

It was time. A sentinel of the besiegers had marked Benedetto's fall, and
the disappearance of the body into the earth. A pool of blood revealed the
entrance to the passage. Ere sunrise Mantua was full of Frederick's
soldiers, full also of burning houses, rifled sanctuaries, violated
damsels, children playing with their dead mothers' breasts, especially full
of citizens protesting that they had ever longed for the restoration of the
Emperor, and that this was the happiest day of their lives. Frederick
waited till everybody was killed, then entered the city and proclaimed an
amnesty. Virgil's bust was broken, and his writings burned with Manto's
body. The flames glowed on the dead face, which gleamed as it were with
pleasure. The old alchemist had been slain among his crucibles; his scrolls
were preserved with jealous care.

But Manto found another father. She sat at Virgil's feet in Elysium; and as
he stroked the fair head, now golden with perpetual youth, listened to his
mild reproofs and his cheerful oracles. By her side stood a bowl filled
with the untasted waters of Lethe.

"Woe," said Virgil--but his manner contradicted his speech--"woe to the
idealist and enthusiast! Woe to them who live in the world to come! Woe to
them who live only for a hope whose fulfilment they will not behold on
earth! Drink not, therefore, of that cup, dear child, lest Duke Virgil's
day should come, and thou shouldst not know it. For come it will, and all
the sooner for thy tragedy and thy comedy."

THE CLAW

The balm and stillness of a summer's night enveloped a spacious piazza in
the city of Shylock and Desdemona. The sky teemed with light drifting
clouds through which the beaming of the full moon broke at intervals upon
some lamp-lit palace, thronged and musical, for it was a night of
festivity, or silvered the dull creeping waters. Ever and anon some richly
attired young patrician descended the steps of one or other of